Google’s Project Soli

Here at The Headstrong Herald we like smart technology. Functional, plug & play and housed in a funky design body – technology is what we crave. At Google they always look further than just focussing on making billions of dollars and euro’s with their Search and Mobile phone technology.

Google’s ATAP team might be on to something that will revolutionize the way we use our everyday devices. By the way ATAP stands for Advanced Technologies and Projects.
Anyways, movement- or gesture recognition based systems are usually attached to video game consoles like the Microsoft Kinect or games like Ubisoft’s Just Dance or even your computer locked on a Leap Motion controller. Project Soli replaces the physical controls of smartwatches with your hands using radar to capture your movements.

How does it work, the short version.

The Soli system uses broad beam radar to measure doppler image (magnetic fields), IQ and spectrogram.
The chip used has a interaction sensor which has a built-in radar. Radar as you know has been used for decades to detect ships (identified or un-identified), air planes, satellites, submarines, guided projectiles and such.

Project Soli focusses on real-time detection of subtle / micro hand movements and uses this as it’s input. With this new technologie the detection happens in a 60GHz radar spectrum at a max. of 10.000 frames per second. This is a lot more accurate than the average camera kinetic sensor.
Soli’s sensor can recognize doppler data, IQ, measure spectrograms, movement, velocity and distance up to a meter or 3.3 feet.

Dear people, technology from The Minority Report is at hand! Soo cool! Project items in mid air and moving them with hand gestures. As in this case ATAP has shrunked the technology to SD card size. So as you can imagine the possibilities are endless if you can integrate this chip into almost anything.

The nice thing about Soli is that – compared with Microsoft Kinect, PlayStation Move, RealSense and Leap Motion – no extra hardware (like a camera) is needed to fully be functional.
Although chip is not fully completed later this year Google tends to make Soli’s open source technology available for developers.